Wyndham Rewards points have one of the strictest expiration policies of all the main hotel loyalty programs.
In fact, there are two factors that play into when your points will expire. First, if your account goes for 18 months with no activity, all of your points will expire. Second, your points will expire four years after they were earned if they’re not redeemed, regardless of any other kind of activity.
A reader contacted us recently to share their experience of the four year expiration policy. They’d originally thought that they’d been able to extend the life of their points, but that’s not what ended up happening.
The reader shared this experience:
The Wyndham trick for extending the life of points by doing a point booking and then cancelling it does not work. It shows the life of the points are extended on your account information, but they still come off when they are 4 years old. I lost over 400,000 points this way. I called and it was a long call and they reinstated my points as a one time courtesy. The person to whom I was speaking was well aware of the trick and stressed doing this will not extend the life of the points and I will not receive this consideration again.
To be honest, I wasn’t aware of the Wyndham trick for extending your points in this way. We’ve shared before how sometimes you can book an award stay in the Wyndham app and cancel it, with that activity occasionally resetting the 48 month clock. However, that’s definitely a YMMV situation that can’t be counted upon.
However, evidently this reader had made some kind of award booking and subsequently cancelled the stay at some point. The expiry date showed as having been extended, but despite that they lost 400K points anyway. Ouch!
Thankfully they were able to convince a customer service rep to reinstate the points in order to give them a chance to redeem them, so all ultimately wasn’t lost in this case. However, if you find yourself in a similar scenario and think that your points have been extended, that may well not be the case.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
The only way that I know to prevent the 4 year expiration on Wyndham points is to transfer them to Caesars and then back to Wyndham. Normally this only works for 30,000 points per year, but right now the limit has been lifted to 60,000 points between now and the end of this year. If you transfer to Caesars, make sure that you add at least one point to your Caesars account every 6 months to keep the points from expiring. The transfers can take a long time to occur so make sure that you transfer the points at least one month before the expiration date.
Frankly, I want to know how they were able to rack up 400k points that ALL EXPIRED AT THE SAME TIME (?!)–the 4yr expiry window is rolling based upon when the points were earned. This would mean that the reader was credited with 400k points all at once (or within a VERY short time)
Especially considering even Diamond tier only nets 12x/$ AND subtracting approx 100k in bonus miles (50k each for earner+ and earner business), that still would have necessitated $25,000 in Wyndham-specific spend–in a single qualifying billing cycle.
Also, Wyndham’s highest redemption tier is only 30k pts/nt. Sitting on at least 13 free nights (400k/30k=13.33; and 53.33 nights at the lowest 7500/nt tier) is baffling to me, considering Wyndham has only a few (very borderline) aspirational redemptions.
***BOTTOM LINE***
While the “points don’t reset” via this method is the main takeaway, I question the validity of the rewards total noted (and the sanity of dropping at least $25k in spend for Wyndham points).
excellent obs
Maybe?
https://frequentmiler.com/buy-wyndham-points/
Possibly, though there are purchase limits on points … Plus the whole question/wisdom of buying 400k points and just letting them sit for 4 years (same goes for transfers)